Marvel Comics are keeping their side of the bargain, admittedly; if you're not interested in the hardcover reprint of poorly-drawn 1980s miniseries Kitty Pryde and Wolverine or the Skrulls! oneshot (pretty much a collection of fact files to bring you up to speed about Secret Invasion's Secret Invaders), then you're pretty much limited to two books: the reprint of the first couple of issues of the Halo: Uprising comic to remind you what happened now that the end is finally nigh, and the far-more-enjoyable-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men, where the team moves to San Francisco and parties at the SFMoMA. In other weeks, it'd easily be the must-have book of the week.

Sadly, though, DC are doing their best to claim that title for themselves with the long-long-long awaited return of Ambush Bug in Ambush Bug: Year None, wherein Keith Giffen's fourth-wall breaking snarkfest takes the last five years of DC's output to task for being confusing, depressing and just plain not fun. You know you want to read that. Collections-wise, you can catch up on space religion in the unfortunately-named-but-actually-fun Countdown To Adventure (starring Animal Man, Starfire and Adam Strange from 52), catch up on the joys of matrimony with Green Arrow/Black Canary: The Road To The Altar, and catch up on how the mighty have fallen with Authority: Prime, where superhero comics' one-time most daring title is reduced to generic continuity schlock. If that last sentence made no sense to you, then perhaps you should avoid superheroes altogether and pick up the X-Files Special, instead.

Image Comics are also making a strong showing this week: The next big Witchblade storyline begins in the first issue of Broken Trinity, Mark Millar and Tony Harris get their political satire on with the debut of War Heroes, Mike Allred's Madman questions reality in the first collection of Madman Atomic Comics, and Tori Amos finally becomes the comic character she's always wanted to be in the indie-creator-tastic anthology Comic Book Tattoo.

And just in case none of that is enough for you, consider the two takes on post-Buffy female heroes available in the indie comicsphere this week: Oni Press' The Apocalypstix finally bring their post-nuclear brand of rock, roll and kick-ass to stores at the same time as Cassie Hack of po-mo horror book Hack/Slash teams up with real-life emo pornlets in the Hack/Slash Annual Featuring The Suicide Girls. And, yes, I wish I was joking about that last one as well.

As ever! All of these books and many, many, more are listed here for your perusal and, if you've somehow made it this far without knowing where your local comic book store happens to be, you can find that out by clicking here. It's probably a great week to go to the store, really, because chances are they may be really quiet...

Updating Josie and The Pussycats' girl-band template for our brave new atomic future, comics' new expression of both Girl Power and Rock'n'Roll Power comes originally came from the frustrations of artist Stewart:

I was just finishing up my work on Catwoman with Ed Brubaker and I was feeling a little burned out and I wanted to draw something fun of my own creation to reinvigorate myself. I made a quick list of things I wanted to draw - cute girls was the top of the list, as anyone who knows me or my work should find completely unsurprising. I'm a big music fan so I wanted to do something that involved rock and roll in some way. And I absolutely did not want to draw lots of architecture, as I was getting sick of drawing the buildings in Gotham City. As a joke, I thought that the easiest environment to draw would be a desert, and then started thinking about how I could put girls and guitars in that setting. Soon I'd thought of an all-girl rock band in a ‘Mad Max’-like future wasteland.

Joining up with fellow Toronto-ite Fawkes, the pair created Mandy, Dot and Megumi (potentially the last Japanese girl alive), the last good band in a world full of evil musicians. As to why a future radioactive Earth finds itself full of bands, writer Fawkes thinks that it just makes sense:

It's sort of a chicken-or-egg situation. I mean, do a lot of musicians survive the apocalypse, or do a lot of people who survive decide that they really need to start making music?” Fawkes said. “If I wake up one day at three in the afternoon and discovered that my home town has been reduced to a cinder, I might just pick up the nearest harmonica and start honkin' it at anyone who wanders by. I might just.

The first volume in the series will debut at this year's San Diego Comic-Con at the end of next month; if you can't wait that long, there's a 50-page preview online here.

Ragna-Rock: Fawkes and Stewart on 'The Apocalypstix [Comic Book Resources]